A research collaboration has emerged bridging two academic institutions half-way across the globe - Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland and University College Dublin in Ireland - with Odaios Foods, a cutting edge food-service provider in Ireland to form an innovative “Food Evolutions” project. This project fuses anthropological knowledge, food and farming sciences, culinary arts, and experimental archaeological evidence to encourage leadership, innovation, and change in modern foodways and culinary practices, from the level of thought leaders in contemporary cuisine, and widening from there to educate and empower the public to take control of their food and eat like humans again.

Our understanding of people, food and diet in the past is informed by archaeology, history, ethnography, enviornmental science, food science and experimental archaeology.

The Food Evolutions Project is a cooperative effort aimed at applying experimental archaeology to address one of the biggest health issues facing humans today…diet. This multidisciplinary research is aimed at understanding and documenting ancestral and modern food practices and fusing them to develop relevant, meaningful and accessible strategies to increase the density and bioavailability of nutrients in modern diets, and to use these in modern culinary techniques primarily focused on taste, texture and visual appeal.